Articulatory and acoustic analysis of consonants differing in intelligibility
H. Timothy Bunnell · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1989
Articulatory and acoustic recordings of a single talker producing multiple repetitions of nonsense utterances were made at the University of Wisconsin X-Ray Microbeam facility. The utterances consisted of the fixed frames “Say a Cawa” and “Say a waCa” with C = {/b/, /d/, /g/}. Each utterance was repeated three times in each of three speaking styles ranging from an exaggerated style intended to be “clear” (i.e., easier for the hard of heating to understand) to a relaxed style intended to be “conversational.” The audio recordings were presented to hearing impaired listeners in a three-alternative forced-choice stop consonant identification task to determine the relative intelligibility of the stop consonants. By hypothesis, the clearest consonants would be found in utterances that exhibited the greatest amounts of articulatory and acoustic change. However, this pattern was not found. For utterances with syllable-initial consonants (e.g., “Say a gawa”), actual intelligibility as estimated by percentage correct stop constant identification was inversely related to both the talkers intent and measures of the extent of articulator motion. Correlational analyses using both articulatory and acoustic measures to predict obtained intelligibility scores will be presented. [Work supported by NIH.]